


Homecoming

by The_Doom_Dahlia



Series: Old Friends [1]
Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz, Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: (one time but it's there), Abusive Relationships, Autistic Character, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Healing, Jewish Character, Physical Abuse, Post-Canon, Post-Squip, Recovery, She's Trying Her Best, brooke and her mother love each other, heather mcnamara is brooke's mother, the warnings should really have a 'general abuse' option
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 17:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12964197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Doom_Dahlia/pseuds/The_Doom_Dahlia
Summary: Heather McNamara reflects on her life and burns away some demons on Halloween night.





	Homecoming

Heather McNamara had found the wedding album in the attic one night. Her daughter was away at some party, a Halloween one at the Dillinger place, and her father was asleep in his room. So she’d decided to do some late night spring cleaning. The book had been in an old cardboard box along with a shoebox of polaroids and the cake topper. Something inside of the back of her mind bitterly crowed over how fitting it was that the cake topper was destroyed. Just like her marriage. Everything else inside of her numbly opened the book and began flipping through pages, looking at everything and feeling bile rise up in her throat and stab against her vocal chords as memories sprinted through her mind like rats through the sewer.

After she’d left Ohio, eagerly pursuing a kindergarten education degree at the state university, she’d tried hard to replicate her youth; the gleeful teenage punches of joy and highs that had dissolved into dust on the day her old leader, her best friend in the world, had given up the ghost (both literally and figuratively). She’d eventually burnt herself out on trying to be the party girl she had once been and the intelligent, kind-hearted, and well balanced student she’d wished to be and tried to focus on her studies. 

Heather Duke, her roommate (having started her own journey to being better) convinced her to come out to one last party. She’d agreed.

There’d been a boy named Joseph Lohst there who Duke had introduced her to. Joseph was boisterous and bright, a beacon of debauched glory, a lighthouse strewn in streamers and crowned with glory. It had taken four more parties for Heather to fall in love with him, and a few more for him to feel the same. They’d married as soon as they’d graduated, rushed off to the altar hand-in-hand and eloped (they’d had a proper wedding when they got back, her mother refused to call her her child unless they did - and didn’t even after). It had all seemed so romantic when it had begun.

It wasn’t romantic anymore.

Joseph had begun to change after seven years of marriage, and it wasn’t for the better. He stayed at his office more, complained and grew more poisonous in his words. He’d deconstruct everything she did and point out everything that was wrong. If nothing was wrong, he’d make something go wrong just to blame her. He mocked her faith and refused to let her to go to Temple or celebrate any of her holidays. He mocked her stimming and special interests and everything that made her her. The confidence she’d built up after years began to fizzle and burn away with every piece of hate he spewed. But she’d stayed. Duke had moved away from Ohio to work as a nurse, and everyone else in her life she either didn’t trust enough to tell or she knew would just tell her that she was being silly.

She’d tried to tell her mother and father, but her mother had told her that she ‘needed to stop complaining’ and that ‘Joseph is a good man, and you’re not being the best wife you can be’. Her father hadn’t spoken. He looked small and sallow and didn’t meet his wife’s eyes. There was a tremble in his hands and fear glinted in the brown doe eyes that matched her own.

Her mother told her, before she left, that she looked like her father more and more everyday.

She found out about her pregnancy on the eve of Thanksgiving, before the turn of the millennium. She’d told him with great trepidation, and was surprised by the joy he conveyed. He still nitpicked, still complained, but treated her better. He told her how excited he was to have a son of his own. “All of the kids in my family have been sons. My dad only had sons, my grandfather only had sons. It’s a blessing!” he’d told her. He didn’t want to know what the gender of the baby was and kept her from going to the doctor to find out because he was so sure it would be a son.

Brooklyn Galya Lohst was born on August 23rd of the first year of the 21st century. Her mother loved her endlessly as soon as she was bundled in her arms. Heather looked up to Joseph with delight in her eyes. Delight that faded when she saw how dark and cold he’d gotten upon seeing the baby girl..

They said nothing.

The family returned to the little blue house on Silverfish Lane, Sherwood Ohio, and things reverted to the way they’d been before Heather was pregnant. Joseph grew more cruel and callous in his words, and Heather didn’t know how to leave. She had no access to the McNamara funds (her mother having cut her off) and Joseph had a stranglehold on the bank accounts. She felt helpless.

The only place she was safe from her husband’s words was in Brooke’s nursery. He never entered there, never really paid attention to the child except to tell her to stop crying. Heather spent hours upon hours in there, keeping herself and her baby safe. 

The end came in October, when Brooke was two months old. Heather had been busy trying to clean Joseph’s clothes (finding more and more strange marks on them, marks she later realized were from lipstick) and had forgotten to cook dinner. He screamed and screamed at her, and when something inside her broke and she told him to leave her alone, he’d lashed out with violence for the first time.

She was left on the ground, bruising slowly appearing around her eye, as he left to go drinking with work friends.

A single thought echoed through Heather’s mind, and solidified her resolve to steel. ‘If he’s willing to hit me, he’s willing to hit Brooke too.’ 

She refused to let that happen.

So, gathering every single bit of money she could around the house and grabbing all of the supplies for the baby (and some for her), she took his car and fled. She only stopped completely when the car, old and creaking and broken beyond repair, died in Middleborough New Jersey.

The divorce came quickly. Joseph was more than happy to take everything Heather had left behind and leave her with nothing but a few dollars and her maiden name returned to her. Heather spent a while in a battered women’s shelter, getting a job as a teacher at the local elementary school. It was only when her mother died, lost after a drowning while drunk at the country club, that her father began to wire her money from the family’s wealth. Father and daughter had suffered under the same cruel fates and now both had to remake themselves.

Heather McNamara rented a little home on the end of Roseburn Street and moved her daughter and her into it. Her father, Brooke’s grandfather, eventually joined them. Heather taught and went to support groups and therapy and began healing. The wound would never fully mend, she knew that. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to move on, and that didn’t mean she couldn’t be happy.

The wedding album and broken figurine went into a small bonfire in the backyard that night. It still burned even when Brooke returned home. She’d dressed as Stevie Nicks, all midnight blue with a black shawl and a haze in her eyes, and she stood by her mother around the little burning pile for a bit.

“Is that the last of the stuff?” she asked curiously, looking up a little at her mother.

Heather nodded. “The only thing left from it is my wedding gown and I sold that to a thrift shop.” she told her daughter, hugging her a little.

“Good.” Brooke said simply, and kissed her mother’s cheek. “Love you, momma.”

“I love you too, honey. C’mon, let’s get inside. I’ll make hot chocolate and you can tell me about the party.” Heather said, patting her back and putting out the flame with a bucket of water. Mother and daughter walked to the porch and prepared to go inside, noticing a moving truck rumbling up the road. “Now, who in the name of the Almighty is moving in at this hour?” she asked aloud, squinting to try and find where the truck was going.

“Looks like it’s going to Jeremy’s house.” Brooke pointed out, curious.

“We’ll see what’s going on in the morning.” Heather resolved. Mother and daughter clutched hands and walked inside the little yellow home, both stopping to touch the mezuzah and pray for a moment before entering, leaving behind the rose garden out front and the slowly dissipating smoke of old ghosts and dogged monsters nestled in scrapbook pages out back.

**Author's Note:**

> the next story is gonna be less dark, i just needed to get through the backstory first


End file.
